Swatch brawls: why are people fighting over pocket watches?
Limited edition mass-market products can swiftly become valuable assets.
Thought
Sources: 3 Quarks Daily, Crooked Timber, The Conversation, Daily Nous, n-Category Café.
Should you embrace your inner stonemason? Why our constant desire for change needs a rethink
In a society obsessed with reform, change and progress, we often overlook the essential work of maintenance.
Why brain health is an urgent priority for G7 member countries
As G7 societies age and birth rates decline, we must invest in collaborative open science research, to optimize brain health for every citizen.
As corporations race for the stars, we need international collaboration on space governance
Human activity is causing large disruptions to the near-Earth space environment. We need an intergovernmental panel on space sustainability.
This Explains Everything
Jonah C. Sirott at the LARB: Two recent books, Jim Newton’s Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening (2025) and Marc Raimondi’s Say H…
How employers can support workers when they take medical leave
About 2 in 3 Americans who are employed can get paid time off work while getting and recovering from chemotherapy or surgeries doctors have told them they need.
As goes CBS Radio News, so goes the idea that news media should serve the public interest
There was once a bipartisan consensus that media power had to be regulated if democracy were to survive.
EPA is sidelining its independent chemical referee – and that endangers public health
The move reshapes how future assessments of chemical dangers will be carried out, and if they’ll be ignored, delayed or understated to benefit industry.
Transgender youth and their families struggle to find gender-affirming care – even in states where it’s still legal
Misinformation and a shifting legal landscape have left many families with trans children uncertain about what care doctors can still provide.
Quantum sensors use atoms, electrons and light as ultra-steady rulers – detecting faint motion, magnetism and gravity for navigation, medicine and science
Quantum computers are still a work in progress but quantum sensors are already in use at hospitals, laboratories and by defense contractors.
Solar activity follows an 11-year cycle – here’s how it controls eruptions and solar flares
The Sun is a complex physical body. It generates incredible amounts of heat and a strong, often tangled, magnetic field.
💭 3 Quarks Daily
Wednesday Poem
A Lost World —found in a notebook morning bright sun good jazz soprano sax above smoky piano on the record player happy wife gone off to do happy things the world either a flowerin…
The Dog’s Gaze
Kirsten Tambling at Literary Review: Twenty-five thousand years ago, a boy and a dog walked into the Chauvet cave in what is now southwestern France. The boy carried a torch, and b…
Your Body, Their Choice
by Charles Siegel Last week the Supreme Court temporarily restored access to mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used in combination to terminate pregnancy. The United States C…
What’s A Tablescape? I’m Glad You Asked.
by William Benzon The term was coined by interior designer David Hicks back in the 1960s, but I didn’t know that when I coined the term earlier this year. I’ve been taking photos o…
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Argentina Through the Eyes of Polish Writer Witold Gombrowicz
Mercedes Halfon at Literary Hub: The scene is something like this: one leaden winter morning the Chrobry, a luxury liner that set sail in Poland and has been traveling across the A…
💭 3 Quarks Daily
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Christian List on Free Will and Levels of Reality
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Did I have any freedom in choosing this particular podcast guest? At the level of particles, fields, and the fundamental laws of physics; no.…
💭 3 Quarks Daily
What Is Agile Government?
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An analysis of what makes young people more likely to commit crimes tears down the influential assumption that character is the main factor
Christopher Browning at Nature: In Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, gang leader Alex DeLarge is portrayed as an ultraviolent miscreant. Once …
💭 Crooked Timber
Occasional paper: St. Anthony’s Turnip
Mostly I leave Sunday photography to our colleague, the estimable Chris Bertram. Still, this Sunday I was walking the dog in the hills above my town. (“My town” being a modest comm…
Sunday photoblogging: Canigou with cherries (2)
💭 Crooked Timber
The text is not the product
Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprisin…
From The People’s Bank to the Banker’s Bank
Last week Australia’s central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia, RBA) raised interest rates. Again. Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to red…
Sunday photoblogging: Pézenas, maison consulaire
Sunday photoblogging: Canigou and cherry trees
Occasional paper: Blue Angels, Devil Hands
That’s the actual name of the paper. Isn’t that great? Here’s a prologue: a post I wrote a while back about the Portuguese Man-o’-War. (It’s kind of long — I was new to CT back the…
Sunday photoblogging: l’Abbaye de Valmagne
💭 Crooked Timber
On Reinforcing Cynicism in the Academy
“I admire the many federal prosecutors across the country who have chosen to resign rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. To my knowledge, no department head, dean, or o…
Occasional paper: Inconstant moon
I said a while back that nobody’s going to Mars any time soon. Which is true. But that doesn’t mean Mars isn’t interesting! Mars is very interesting. So today’s paper is about Mars…